Top Ten Wordpress Plugins for Your Blog or Website

Do you have your own blog and/or website?

The Wordpress Plugins your Website Needs

Wordpress makes designing a website or running your own blog a breeze with thousands of custom themes to choose between. These themes handle the layout of how your content is presented to your viewing public.

You can expand upon the functionality of your website simply by adding plugins.

Installing a new plugin to your site is as easy as logging into your Wordpress backend, going to Plugins, click Add New, and upload the plugin you downloaded.

We use all ten of these plugins with great success on our website www.recapgaming.com. If you care to see them in action, follow the link.

Below we will go over the ten best plugins you should be using for your website.

1. Akismet

If you allow users to post comments you will soon find out there are thousands of bots scouring the internet and spamming blogs with links. Akismet will help protect you from this spam. Akismet has blocked over 93 BILLION spam posts to date.

Akismet is made by Automattic, the developers of Wordpress itself. It compiles spam received on other participating wordpress blogs to effectively block or filter them on your website. Akismet is free to use for personal use, or $5/month for business use.

If you are running a commercial website and are looking for a free alternative we recommend Antispam Bee.

2. BackWPup

You might not think to backup your Wordpress site, but it's extremely important. Keeping your data safe protects you from losing everything if you get hacked, user error, hardware failures, or incompatibility issues that may arise.

Using BackWPup this process couldn't be any easier. You can schedule your backup to an external ftp site, a Dropbox account, e-mail, and more. You can also run your complete with a click of a button from your admin bar. And to top it off it's free.

3. W3 Total Cache

Improve your page speed with the #1 caching plugin.

After installing W3 Total Cache, you can expect to see up to 10x faster page loading. Visiting a website that takes a long time to load is terrible for the user experience. Google also penalizes your site in its rankings. Google analytics displays your site speed under the content section and is an important part of your site health.

4. Google Analytics Dashboard for WP

In the backend of Wordpress this plugin will display your google analytics directly into your Dashboard. You can also set access levels of who else can see it so you could share traffic statistics with your team.

You can also get a plugin from the same author to display Adsense revenue if you are interested.

7. Digg Digg

Allowing your visitors to easily share content is also very important. With Digg Digg you can enable sharing to varying networks at a click of a button next to every post you publish.

It also shows a counter so you can see how many times each article is shared with each network. Don't go without this one! Sharing over social networks could give you millions of views, it just depends who shares it.

8. Disqus

Disqus helps remove poor comments, link spamming, etc by allowing your community to upvote the better comments. You can also monetize your content section by allowing Disqus to show similar discussions from other websites (completely optional). If your visitors click through you are paid.

9. Google XML Sitemaps

This may look confusing but it's a small plugin that does something very important for you. When Google and other web crawlers come to your website to see how and what they should index into their search engines, this plugin will provide that answer for them with a sitemap.

Additionally every time you update your site with a new post the search engines are notified of the change automatically for you.

This makes everyone's life easier and will optimize how your site is indexed.

Comments

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Jennifer 4 years agofrom Canada

I love Wordpress! Great hub! Very informative!

sfharper 4 years agofrom Winter Springs, FL

Wonderful suggestions Jason!

Liane 4 years ago

Maybe Digg digg is getting older, I personally love the calendar which allows you to schedule your post months in advance .

www.setting4success.com

Author

Jason Benedict 4 years agofrom Boca Raton, Florida

Thanks for your comment iboomz!

Author

Jason Benedict 4 years agofrom Boca Raton, Florida

Thanks Robert! Glad you got use from the article.

Avinash Joshi 4 years agofrom India

really helpful and important info for a novice blogger.

Robert 4 years ago

I did website with wordpress few weeks ago and that will help me a lot to improve my site.

Author

Jason Benedict 4 years agofrom Boca Raton, Florida

Thanks JimCGreen, hope it helped!

JimCGreen 4 years agofrom Milford, Delaware

good recommendations; especially have been considering adding polls.

Author

Jason Benedict 4 years agofrom Boca Raton, Florida

Check it out Alex, it installs into the media section of WordPress.

alexmaina 4 years ago

never heard of the ewww image optimizer

Rose 4 years ago

Thanks Jason. Love it!

Author

Jason Benedict 4 years agofrom Boca Raton, Florida

Thanks for the share and reading Shin Rocka!

Author

Jason Benedict 4 years agofrom Boca Raton, Florida

Hi Nat, The best thing about writing the hub is it forces you to do some extra research and discover new things for yourself. Discovered Disqus and Ewww Image Optimizer that way. Some people also use Yahoo Smushit for images.

Natasha 4 years agofrom Hawaii

Thanks for this! I have a coupe of these, but I need to check out a few of the others!

Author

Jason Benedict 4 years agofrom Boca Raton, Florida

Thanks Moonlake. Wordpress is easier than you might think. It's got a similar back-end where you don't need to know how to code like HubPages. Thank you for the share! You are too kind.

shin_rocka04 4 years agofrom Maryland

Great info! Voting up, sharing, and pinning!

Subhas 4 years agofrom New Delhi, India

Very important info.

moonlake 4 years agofrom America

Very interesting hub. I have been looking at WordPress but have done nothing. Like this information. Voted up, shared and G+

Author

Jason Benedict 4 years agofrom Boca Raton, Florida

Thanks for reading! An honorable mention is "Ewww Image Optimizer" which auto reduces image size without any loss to quality for your blog resulting in faster loading speed.

rose 4 years ago

Really like this! Changing poll on my blog. Thanks!

FishingKev 4 years ago

Thank you for this information.. I know I can improve my blog with some of these tools

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